Universe, which we have learnt not to bound, still, in its inconceivable totality, but as a drop hung from the Empyrean; is not darkness. around it; is not Hell beneath it? And what though all are not such? Is it not the highest function of a book to perpetuate likemindedness to its author after he is gone, and may not Paradise Lost be doing this? Nay, and what though the relevancy of the poem to the present soul of the world should have been more impaired by the lapse of time and the change of ideas than we have admitted it to be, and though much of the interest of it, as of all the other great poems of the world, should now be historical? Even so, what an interest it possesses! What a portrait, what a study, of a great English mind of the seventeenth century it brings before us! "I "wonder not so much at the poem itself, though worthy of all "wonder," says Bentley in the preface to his edition of the poem, "as "that the author could so abstract his thoughts from his own troubles "as to be able to make it: that, confined in a narrow and to him a "dark chamber, surrounded with cares and fears, he could expatiate "at large through the compass of the whole Universe, and through "all Heaven beyond it, and could survey all periods of time from "before the creation to the consummation of all things. This theory, no doubt, was a great solace to him in his affliction, but it shows "in him a greater strength of spirit, that made him capable of such a solace. And it would almost seem to me to be peculiar to him, "had not experience by others taught me that there is that power in "the human mind, supported with innocence and conscia virtus, that "can make it shake off all outward uneasiness and involve itself secure and pleased in its own integrity and entertainment." It is refreshing to be able to quote from the great scholar and critic words showing so deep an appreciation of the real significance of the poem which, as an editor, he mangled. Whatever else the Paradise Lost is, it is, as Bentley here points out, a monument of almost unexampled personal magnanimity.

66

It is not improbable that Milton's blindness, which we are apt to think of as a disqualification for poetry, as for other things, may, in the case of Paradise Lost, have been a positive qualification.

One can imagine many effects of blindness on the mind of a poet. Milton himself, as if with a presentiment of what was one day to be his own fate, had more than once, in his earlier poems, touched on

this very theme. Thus, in his sixth Latin Elegy, written in 1629, speaking of strictness of life, and even habits of asceticism, as necessary for all poets of the highest order, he says:—

"Hoc ritu vixisse ferunt post rapta sagacem

Lumina Tiresian,"

and then proceeds to couple the name of the seer Tiresias, in this respect, with that of the poet Homer, who was likewise blind. Again, more expressly, in the Latin lines De Idea Platonicâ, also written in youth, we have mention of the same Tiresias and his blindness thus:

"cui profundum cæcitas lumen dedit Dirceus augur."

One remembers also Milton's visit of reverence to the blind Galileo, and those lines in Paradise Lost itself (III. 33—36) where he tells us of the secret pleasure he had in associating himself with his famous blind predecessors of the ancient world:

"Those other two, equalled with me in fate
(So were I equalled with them in renown),—
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides;
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old."

As to these old poets and prophets blindness had given "the profounder insight," might it not be so also in his case?

least he prays.

"As I too am blind," he continues,

"So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,

For this at

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight."

But not only in this semi-mystic sense, so dear to Milton, and so natural to his mode of thought,—that bodily blindness, in men like him, might perhaps be accompanied by deeper and sublimer spiritual vision, a larger gift of the real faculty of the seer,—not in this sense alone might it be contended that, in his great poem, his blindness was even a qualification. Nor yet need it be meant merely, in a more prosaic consideration, that his blindness, by shutting in his mind from external objects, concentrated it on his daring theme and left him at more liberty to pursue it. Nor, again, need we have in view only that influence which would be exerted over his poetry, and

especially over the structure and music of his verse, by the fact that his blindness prevented him from composing on paper, and compelled him to compose mentally. These and other influences of blindness may have all had effects. But the influence of which I speak is something more peculiar and specific.

The one sensation, as we may fancy, ever directly present to a blind man, that had once enjoyed sight, would be that of infinitely extended surrounding darkness or blackness. In Milton's case, we learn from himself, it was not quite so in the first years of his blindness, though it may have gradually become so afterwards. Writing, on the 28th of September 1654, to his Greek friend Philaras, in answer to a letter which Philaras had sent him, giving him hope that his blindness might not be incurable, and requesting a statement of the symptoms of his case, which Philaras might submit to the celebrated surgeon and oculist, Thevenot of Paris, Milton communicates various particulars as to the manner in which his blindness had come on, and his sensations after it had become total. It had been gradually coming on, he tells us, for ten years; the left eye had failed first; then the right, the vision of which had begun to be sensibly affected three years before the time of his then writing. Before this eye had quite failed, i.e. before his blindness could be called total, there had seemed to come from his shut eyes, on his lying down at night, copious bursts or suffusions of glittering light; but, as from day to day his vision faded towards extinction, these flashes of light had been exchanged for similar bursts of fainter colours, shot as with audible force from the eyes. "Now, however," he adds, "as if lucency were extinct, it is a mere blackness, or a blackness dashed, "and as it were inwoven, with an ashy colour (merus nigror aut "cineraceo distinctus et quasi intextus), that is wont to pour itself "forth; yet the darkness which is perpetually before me, by night as well as by day, seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish (albenti semper quam nigricanti propior), and such that, "when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small "chink, a certain little trifle of light." As this was written when Milton had been blind but two years at the utmost, may we not suppose that the process of darkening which he describes had continued after 1654, and that, by the time he had begun his Paradise Lost, even that little chink of which he speaks had been barred, so that the medium in which he found himself, night and day, had then

less of the whitish or ash-gray in it, and more of the hue of absolute black? Such a supposition would accord with his own words in the poem (III. 41-49):

"Not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of Even or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works."

And, more decidedly, we seem to see the same suggested in the words of Samson respecting his blindness (Sams. Agon. 80, 81):

"O, dark, dark, dark! amid the blaze of noon

Irrecoverably dark; total eclipse!"

Now, whether the medium in which a man moved who had lost his sight were such a total opaque of infinitely extended blackness, or only a paler surrounding darkness of ashy gloom, in what would his imaginations of things physical consist? Would they not consist in carving this medium into zones, divisions and shapes, in painting phantasmagories upon it or in it, in summoning up within it or projecting into it combinations of such recollections of the once visible world as remained strongest and dearest in the memory? But are there not certain classes of images, certain kinds of visual recollection, that would be easier in such a state of blindness than others? While the recollections of minute and indifferent objects became dimmer and dimmer, while it might be difficult for a man long blind to recall with exactness the appearance, for example, of such a flower as the violet, or the aspect of a lichen-veined seat at the root of a tree, might not there be a compensation in the superior vividness with which certain other sensations of sight, and in particular all luminous effects, all contrasts of light and darkness, were remembered? If a blind man, that had once enjoyed sight, retained a more vivid recollection of some objects than of others, and a keener faculty in calling up their images, might they not be such objects as these a lamp, the mouth of a furnace, the sun, the moon, a ball of red-hot iron, the ground covered with snow, the nocturnal sky studded with stars? Might not one that had become blind even excel a

person not so afflicted in all that kind of physical description which consisted in contrasts of light and darkness, of blaze and blackness, or could be effected poetically through the metaphor of luminousness?

Apply this to Paradise Lost. In the first place, the very scheme and conception of the poem as a whole seems a kind of revenge against blindness. It is a compulsion of the very conditions of blindness to aid in the formation of a visual phantasmagory of transcendent vastness and yet perfect exactness. That roof of a boundless Empyrean above all, beaming with indwelling light; that Chaos underneath this, of immeasurable opaque blackness; hung into this blackness by a touch from the Empyrean, our created Universe, conceived as a sphere of soft blue ether brilliant with luminaries; separated thence by an intervening belt of Chaos, and marked as a kind of antarctic zone of universal space, a lurid or dull-red Hell in all this what else have we than the poet making districts in the infinitude of darkness in which he himself moved, and, while suffering some of the districts to remain in their native opaque, rescuing others into various contrasts of light? But not only in the total conception or diagram of the poem may this influence of blindness be traced. In the fillingup, in the imagination of what goes on within any one of the districts into which space is so marked out, or by way of the intercourse of the districts with each other, we may trace the same influence. True, there are portions of the poem where the poet, retracting his regards from the vast and the distant, occupies himself in describing this Earth, and the Eden amidst it, and the Paradise of loveliness within that Eden. By far the larger proportion of the physical descriptions in the poem is, however, of a different kind: not descriptions of landscape, nor terrestrial descriptions at all, but descriptions of phenomena and incidents in the astronomical universe, or in the realms of Heaven, Chaos, and Hell beyond that universe, or interconnecting those realms with that Universe and with Earth. Much of the action and incident consists of the congregation of Angelic Beings in bands beyond our universe, or in their motions singly towards our universe, descrying it from afar, or in their wingings to and fro within our universe from luminary to luminary. Now, in all those portions of the poem, involving what may be called physical description of a supra-terrestrial kind, the mere contrast of darkness with light, the mere imagery of lucency,—of light in masses, streaks, gleams, particles, or discs,-goes very far. Many instances